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‘Ten people immediately boarded an Ilyushin-14 at Baikonur. There was a bad fog, but they took off anyway.’ Cooperative KGB officers were despatched to the more colourful establishments of Samara (then Kuibishev) on the Volga, hunting for a couple of off-duty time-bomb experts with a shared love of drink and girls. ‘They were taken from a party, in quite a state, and they were given a plane to Siberia, and we were counting the time left. Perhaps the charge would go off before sixty-four hours? Who knows what the timer was doing? It was a big risk.’

The capsule had come down close to the Arctic Circle. This being March, the daylight in that part of the world lasted no more than a few hours. Fortunately the parachute was spotted from the air just before darkness fell. The bomb was defused and the dog was saved.

In part, this drama was created by the difficulty of maintaining proper radio contact with a spacecraft. The Americans at NASA had the advantage of a worldwide network of listening posts to keep in contact with their Mercury space capsules. They made diplomatic arrangements with Australia, Nigeria, India, the Canary Islands and Mexico to site large and powerful radio dishes on their territory. Communications engineers then laid down an extensive grid of relay towers and undersea cables to connect these stations with the flight managers at Cape Canaveral. (The well-known mission control centre in Houston had not yet been constructed.) In all, the ‘Mercury Tracking Network’ was a diplomatic and technical achievement just as impressive as the spacecraft itself.8 It formed the basis of an international system that functions to this day. NASA’s spacecraft are never out of communication, unless they disappear for a while behind the moon, or another planet.

Soviet Russia was unable to make such tidy arrangements, because their foreign allies did not live in the right places. Once a spacecraft had disappeared over the farthest horizon of home territory, it was out of communication. The solution was to equip a fleet of four 12,000-tonne cargo ships with special radio masts and send them out into the world’s oceans. They transmitted spacecraft data back to Russia, where the signals were in turn relayed to Baikonur for Korolev’s inspection. Because the cargo ships’ radio pulses were so easy for Westerners to intercept, all the telemetry had to be coded for security. Mazzhorin says, ‘Our vessels were observed from the air. The planes came very close, and took many pictures. The [foreign observers] never boarded us, though they probably guessed the ships’ purpose from their locations and sailing times. If they did board, the crew were instructed to burn all their code books immediately in a special stove. As soon as each space mission was over, the vessels would carry on and deliver their cargoes – grain, palmira seeds or whatever – to earn money.’

On March 25, 1961, one month ahead of Yuri Gagarin, Ivan Ivanovich flew for the first time, dressed in the same type of spacesuit and equipped with the same model of ejection seat and parachute harness. He flew his Vostok well, and took time to send some radio messages back home, although his observations about space were somewhat strange. In fact, he relayed instructions for making soup: schi (cabbage soup) and borscht with beetroot and sour cream. The exact details of the recipe are now lost, but it seems to have been a deliberate attempt to confuse any Western listening posts monitoring the flight.

Ivan’s descent and landing caused great anxiety for witnesses on the ground. Local villagers saw him come down under his own parachute, and they decided that something did not look quite right. The instant Ivan’s feet touched the ground he fell over, apparently unconscious. Naturally the villagers ran over to help, but a cordon of troops quickly surrounded the cosmonaut’s prostrate body. The soldiers made no effort to help, but simply stood around him as if to let him die. The villagers were